


Restless

by Monochromely



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: angstttttt, lots of sentence fragments bc I love them and their poetic feel, past bruce/nat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 17:09:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14752919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: No one tells them to stop..So they don't.Natasha and Steve deal with the immediate fallout of the snap.





	Restless

**Author's Note:**

> Idk why, but this piece took me forever to write... even now, I'm not sure if I'm entirely happy with it, lol, but, uh, since I'm a completionist, I wanted to get it up here anyway. c: Enjoy.

No one tells them they need to stop.

That was Sam’s job. He’d always been the practical one, the realist, the oh-my-God-I-know-y’all-are-super-soldiers-but-you-have-to- _sleep_  kind of guy.

But Sam…

Steve scrubs his face with his hands at the memory.

Natasha’s gritted teeth draw blood inside her mouth.

…Sam is just another phantom who haunts them each time they close their eyes.

No one tells them they need to stop.

So they don’t.

-

Steve volunteers for body recovery duty, engaging the blood choked Wakandan plains with the same kind of belligerent furor he exercises in battle, softening only when his arms encircle a lost one, a once-was, a damn casualty of an intergalactic war that no one asked for. A member of the Dora Milaje whose limbs are bent at unnatural angles. (He closes her half-lidded eyes and cradles her gently to his chest. The golden bangles around her wrists peal a mournful funeral dirge.) A young boy who cannot be much older than eighteen. ( _He has shepherd hands_ , Steve thinks. Calloused. Bandaged on the tips of long fingers. A sheepherder amongst wolves.) 

He edges beyond the perimeter of the battlefield when the corpses there have been cleared—into the colorful villages and marketplaces, treading wearily—and follows the blood trail mindless aliens left behind. A whole family here. A young couple there. A seven-year old. A seventy-year old. The carnage indiscriminate.

Bodies everywhere.

Torn apart.

Desecrated.

Strewn like straw on a stable floor.

Steve retrieves a body.

Takes it to the triage center.

Returns back to the fields.

Picks up another mother, father, child, lover, warrior, grandparent, aunt, uncle, friend.

Triage center, where he just catches a flash of  _her_  platinum blonde hair winding through the innumerable cots.

Fields.

Body.

And he loses himself in the rhythm of the work.

Triage center.

Fields.

Body.

Because all of _these_  people, these hundreds who did not crumble to dust, are on  _him_. 

He wanted to give Vision more time, and he stole some from Wakanda just to fail at the one goal he desperately sought to achieve.

Triage center.

Fields.

Body.

Triage center.

Fields.

Body after body after  _body._

Steve dry heaves against the side of a house graffitied with blood, muscles tensed against the wooden wall, shaking hands leaving violent indents in the planks. 

And he takes a couple of asthmatic breaths when he thinks he’s done. Inhale. Exhale. Cough. Inhale.

Not the real kind, of course, but the vestiges from seventy-years ago.

When panic used to send his beaten up lungs into overdrive and the air around him quickly became shallow, insufficient, inaccessible. 

(These were warning signs that he needed help.)

Steve steadies his head against the building, his dark hair pushing forcibly into splinters and blood that isn’t his. The dull sting focuses him enough to stand upright.

He wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

Squares his shoulders.

And staggers on.

Triage center.

Fields.

Body.

Afraid of what will surely catch up to him if he stops.

-

“I won’t lie to you,” she says quietly. “The first sting hurts pretty badly, but it gets better after that.”

“Promise?” The boy—he’s twelve, maybe thirteen—stares up at her with wide eyes like discs. They’re glazed with unshed tears, and he’s trying to puff his skinny chest up, trying to be strong.

But Natasha thinks this little guy is strong enough already, no posturing needed. An alien’s claws slid down the length of his left arm as he used the other to gesture at his sister to run. 

That’s strength.

“Yeah.” Her voice is soothing, simulating the effect of an analgesic. “I promise.” And she presses the medicine soaked rag to the oozing wound, unflinching when his hoarse scream rents the air between them.

Then she bandages him up, places a hand on his head, and moves on to the next cot. 

There’s always a next cot.

The triage center is overcrowded.

With injured civilians and combatants.

With people frantically looking for their loved ones (hoping they’ve simply been mauled by an alien and not turned into dust).

With the deceased.

In a detached way, Natasha appreciates the chaos, weaponizes it as she does most things in this life, lets it pull her in, lets its urgency recalibrate her mind. She is neither Natasha Romanoff nor the Black Widow as she moves lithely through the makeshift medical bay, her features even unless they are modeling sympathy, her hands swift, precise, impersonal. She is an extension of the recovery effort, a mere tool to assist, and tools do not have time to think of their own losses.

Tools must be functional.

So she cleans debris from a warrior’s cheek.

Sews up a priestess’s holy hand with tiny, meticulous stitches.

Demands that Okoye let her examine that nasty cut above her eyebrow,  _or so help me, I’ll_ —

Lowers bodies into black bags, catching a glimpse of those blue eyes she knows so well as  _he_  gently adds another corpse to the collection.

Turns away promptly. She doesn’t have the time.

Tools must be functional.

Tools cannot shed tears for the friends they’ve lost.

Tools cannot flinch each time they check their phone to see if Clint Barton has made contact yet.

Tools do not entertain emotion.

Tools must be functional.

(Deep down, Natasha knows that it’s been a long time since she’s only been a tool.)

-

The bed is soft, plush, and, according to Shuri, heated to a perfectly calibrated comfort setting that changes based on the height and weight of its user. By all means, it  _should_  be unspeakably relaxing to his sore, bruised bones. It  _should_  be the best sleep he’s had in two years given the fact that exile hasn’t offered anything better than lumpy hotel mattresses at best and cold floors at worst. It  _should_  be an easy sleep, an involuntary one, given the day he’s had.

All those bodies.

All those friends of his that became particulate matter when Thanos snapped his fingers.

But they are the precise reasons that Steve Rogers cannot sleep in his soft, warm bed tonight. He dozes fitfully, and the bodies, the faces stalk him into nightmares.

The broken Dora Milaje warrior.

The shepherd boy cut down in green pastures.

Vision. His body leached of color as he laid among the brown bracken.

Wanda. He can still see the tortured contortions of her delicate features when she realized that Vision had to die, had to die by _her hand_. In his paralyzed half-sleep, she peers at him sadly—too old to be so young—and tells him she wanted more time. He tries to reach out to her, wants to apologize, but he can’t get the words out, and she disappears in a swirl of ashes just as he finds his tongue.

They looked everywhere for Sam—him, Natasha, and Rhodey—trampling through forest and blood and fading sunlight for hours and hours and hours, but Sam has never kept them waiting before. No one can say he positively fell to dust, but that’s the conclusion they have to draw when he doesn’t turn up, neither in body nor life.

 _Sam_ , he moans and his fingers curl into his pillow. His gap toothed smile flashes through his dreams and plucks at him where it hurts.

They’d spent these two last years together, and it was more than enough to confirm Steve’s initial suspicion that Sam is... was... one of the best people he was lucky enough to share the earth with. He was warm and funny and always had a word of encouragement to bolster their spirits through dark nights. 

And now he’s gone.

And then there’s Bucky.

It is Bucky who finally makes him scream himself into consciousness.

But that’s not a particularly new thing.

His body thrusts upward in a panicked arc, and he claps his hand over his mouth to stop his own voice in its grief-stricken tracks, to slow his labored breaths.

His roll call of lost people had ended with a question: “Steve?”

And he watched again as his best friend stumbled into black nothingness.

Even now, with eyes wide open, as he stares into the heavy darkness of his bedroom, the moment seizes over and over and over again across his field of vision.

“Steve?”

He had sounded so lost, so confused. (And was there a note of pain he detected? Did he suffer in the end? Did Wanda? Did Sam? All of the other three and a half billion people, too?)

“Steve?”

Steve had just gotten him back—mind, body, and soul—and now he’s  _dead_? Just like that? Just because a big, purple grape snapped his fingers and made it so? 

“Steve?”

With a feral snarl, he staggers out of bed and onto the hard floor, leg caught in twisted sheets, chin scraping against wood, and it’s too much.

It’s all too much, and he lowers his head to the floor with a sob that shatters his entire body.

He doesn’t hear the door open.

—

“Natasha.”

It’s two in the morning when Banner’s quiet voice reaches her where she’s sitting at a desk in the medical center, boots unceremoniously propped up on its smooth surface, chair tilting back on two legs. She looks up from her phone—still no contact from Clint despite the twenty-seven texts and thirteen calls she’s angrily sent his way—and finds herself under the scientist’s stern, microscopic gaze, the one that pinches at the corners of his dark eyes and wrinkles his forehead, the one that plucks at her beneath skin and tight smiles and the masks she so expertly touts. With one searching glance, she can see the traces of his concern in each and every one of his features. It is etched between the earth and blood dusting his face, and heavy in the slight frown crooked at the corner of his mouth, and written across his furrowed brow in what could very well be neon paint for all of his subtlety. He has surveilled her and found her wanting. He  _sees_  her, and Natasha suddenly finds that she doesn’t want to hear whatever the hell he has to say.

“Hey,” she nods, studiously casual, arms folded over her stomach. Her chair lands with a crisp  _plunk_  on the floor, and she tosses her phone lightly, indifferently onto the desk, as if she has not been obsessively tethered to it for the past eight hours. “Finished up your rounds?”

“Yeah.” Bruce bounces his foot as he’s wont to do, his thumbs fidgeting together nervously in the clasp of his hands, and his jittery words reflect this overall picture of nervous motion. “I’m calling it for the night. Everyone seems to be as, uh,  _stable_  as they can be considering they’ve been teeth-marked by aliens.” 

His mouth crumples into a bitter smile, and the harsh lines around his eyes only seem to solidify into shadows.

The implicit message: This day has  _sucked._

Which is a sentiment Natasha can drink to, so she returns his gesture with a laugh that sounds harsh to even her own ears.

It’s  _funny_  (it’s not really funny) because she was complicit in bringing these aliens to Wakanda, and it was all for nothing anyway because Thanos  _won_. Thanos snapped his fingers, and half the world turned to dust. So there’s that, and here’s some more red in her ledger, and she thinks her hands will never be clean of all this blood.

“You should get some rest, too,” he tries gently, encouraged by her laugh, but he’s tentative, too, because this is thoroughly unfamiliar territory for them. It’s been three years, and they’ve both moved on, but how do they come back from the way they left things off—while also dealing with the immediate aftermath of a universal genocide, no less? How do they go back to the old easiness that once existed between them? How do they even begin to try to possibly recover?

It’s hard and maybe even impossible, and when Natasha looks into Bruce’s weathered eyes, she finds that she doesn’t know if she can trust him.

Hell, she didn’t know if she could trust him when they were  _together_  for all of two-and-a-half weeks.

“I’m fine,” she says curtly, and when she realizes she’s a little  _too_  curt, that he’s only trying to be considerate, she softens, just enough for him to see that she’s making an effort. “I mean, thanks… I just prefer to be here right now.”

She doesn’t think she has to elaborate. Bruce isn’t stupid; he knows what waits in the darkness for all of them tonight, and if Natasha has anything to say about it, those unspoken things can wait until they rot.

But to her surprise—Banner has surprised her more than once in the past twenty-four hours—he presses on anyway. Three years ago, her polite but clear shutdown would have been the end of their conversation. He would have nodded and let it be, unwilling to push against her pulling away, but he’s… different now even if he still fidgets, more lax, and maybe, just maybe, more comfortable with who he is and what he has done. He pulls a hand across the back of his neck and shakes his head ever so slightly, and he gazes down at her knowingly over his wire-rimmed glasses, his soft smile a reproach to her—even if he doesn’t quite intend it to be so.

“C’mon, Nat—there’s gotta be another place you could be other than the medical center. Look at you,” he jokes gently, “you’re a mess. I’m a mess. Let’s go be messes who at least have clean clothes on.”

Still smiling, he offers her a hand.

And she freezes, staring at the upturned palm as though it is holds a grenade.

And thinking, thinking, thinking, Natasha bites her lip and takes it.

There is  _one_  place she’d like to be.

—

“Steve?” The question made out of his name is all too familiar, but the voice behind the question isn’t the one he was expecting. It’s low and susurrant, like smoke drifting lazily out of a beehive. It crouches down beside him silently and runs slender fingers through his wet hair. It travels down to his face and thumbs away a tear that has slipped down his cheek.

Natasha.

Steve lifts his head slowly, cautiously, the tired tendons in his neck straining against the movement, and by the golden square of light seeping in from the hallway, he can just make out her green eyes peering at him through the semidarkness. She moves slightly to withdraw her hand, and the light catches a flash of her jaw. She falls back to the floor crosslegged, and then she is but a blackness flickering hazily across his vision. The whole effect—the light, the shadows, and the way they play upon her person—is surreal, and he’s afraid to touch her, afraid to take his eyes off her lest she becomes dust like the rest of their friends… and yet, he has to touch her. He is desperate to make contact.

So he reaches out into the darkness—hesitantly, tenderly—and brushes a stray strand of hair from her forehead, the side of his hand skimming her soft skin.

Her body.

Her.

“Natasha?” He’s asking a very specific question when he says her name; he just doesn’t quite know what it is, and asking anything else would be impossible for him right now. His fingers are frozen against the planes of her smooth face.

But she’s Natasha, and she always knows.

“I’m here, Steve,” she tells him, and it’s all he needs. 

He pulls her to him with all the desperation of a dying man—she’s small in his arms but solid and warm and  _there_ —and buries himself into her shoulder, gasping loudly with relief. (The dying man breaks the surface of the water and drags oxygen into his wet lungs. The undertow has churned him up and spit him back out, and maybe’s he not dying anymore.)

Natasha digs her fingers into his shirt, grasping at the soft material with a violence that keeps her hands from shaking. (She’s good at what she does, terribly good at making the entire world her play stage, but she’s also human, and tears fall unbidden from her eyes. They drip into his lap, and he holds her tighter to him each time that they do.)

They’re here.

They’ve survived.

They are  _broken_.

—

“Clint’s dead,” she says into the paling darkness. It’s nearly morning, and grayish light dully washes in from the tall windows.

They’re propped up against the side of Steve’s bed, and his arm is wrapped around her shoulders, her head nestled against his chest.

He’d been dozing, but he registers her statement clearly, his answer quick, if laden with the dregs of fatigue.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” she insists, but her very insistence is resigned, lifeless. “He would have called by now. It isn’t like him to…”

He cuts across her sharply, even though his words are gentle. “You don’t know until you  _know_ , Nat _…_ you’ll never be satisfied until you find out for sure.”

He’s right, of course.

No need to make  _more_  dead people when there are already so many.

Too many.

(But still, why hasn't he called?)

She falls silent, and he runs his fingers absentmindedly through her hair.

A long pause and then: “Bucky’s dead.”

It costs him to say it out loud. He leans his head back on the bed and closes his eyes, his body tensing around hers.

There’s no sense of relief that comes with admitting it, or even hearing it spoken aloud.

Bucky’s dead, and dead is dead is dead.

“And Sam,” she murmurs, turning away from him as assorted memories of Wilson threaten to overwhelm her. His cocksure grin. His loud laugh. The way he looked like a graceful dancer in flight in his Falcon gear, the metal wings refracting diamonds in the sunlight. He’d called her  _007_  because he was the type of guy to find outdated allusions funny (as did she).

“And Wanda.” Who was just a  _kid_ , dammit.

“And Vision.” Who had just begun to figure out what it meant to be  _alive_.

“And King T’Challa.” Steve is quiet, almost detached as he adds, “Maybe even Stark.”

She twists his way again, throws his own words back at him with the ghost of a smile: “You don’t know that.”

“I don’t,” he agrees, looking down at her with an almost smile of his own.

More silence then.

And it is silence that is unbearable to both of them.

Wordlessly, when it’s too much and not enough all at the same time, they extract themselves from each other and stand up, stretching their sore muscles in the gray light, both relieved that it’s day again, perhaps both scared of the night now. He presses his cracked lips to her hair and slips off into the bathroom. She leaves his room, heads to her own to take a shower, already running down the possibilities of what she could to do today.

Maybe she’ll return to the medical center and help out there again.

Maybe she’ll just… leave—fly to America, search out Clint.

Maybe she’ll nurse a bottle or two.

She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t have to know yet as long as she throws herself into  _something_.

Natasha moves mechanically on.

They both do.

—

No one tells them they need to stop.

That’d been Sam’s job, but Sam is dead, scattered somewhere in the Wakandan forest.

So Steve attends burial ceremonies all day and scratches every name on his arm in pen.

And Natasha submerges herself in bandages and stitches and the moans of patients, constantly aware of the phone in her back pocket—not its weight but its silence, for it is its silence that weighs on her.

No one tells them they need to stop.

So they carry on during the day the only ways they know how.

And when it’s night, shatter together in the darkness.

Restless.

Unresolved.

Broken.


End file.
